And you will surely be open-minded enough about the stories respectively told by scripture and science to have reserved judgment on their validity and to be on the look-out for a book that will sort things out, even though it's pretty clear from the cover and first pages that The Serpent's Promise is going to side with science.īut if you are the person just described, you'll probably not know many others like you. You will not have been in the market for one of the many current suggestions about how science and religion can carve up the culture and divide authority without serious inconvenience to each other: it's not cultural harmony you really want but solid information. You will not have been wholly satisfied with Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion, since what you have been wanting isn't a foam-flecked denunciation of religious ignorance, lies and superstitions but a calmer and more patiently informative update of the Good Book. The Serpent's Promise is the book you've been waiting for, its title an allusion to the eye-opening and the knowledge-of-all-things that the snake promised Eve in Eden. And, of course, you'd want to know about the latest scientific wisdom on the origin of species, Egyptian plagues, universal floods, the sun standing still in the sky, and whether certain foods are in fact unclean abominations.
The Old Testament, for example, has all those begats, but little or nothing about the mechanics of generation it records the ages of the patriarchs, topped by Methusaleh's 969, but you'd like to find out what life scientists now think about human longevity and its prospects. You'd like now to compare its factual content with what modern technical experts have to say. Y ou've always thought of the Bible as an early science text.
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